Thursday, April 29, 2010

As a nonmember of the Cult of Apple and the frequent target of (gay) members of it, I love that L. Ron Hubbard Steve Jobs & Co. are revealing what homophobic surprisingly un-gay-friendly nutjobs they really are. Even Jon Stewart called him/them out on their bullying corporate behemoth ways, while begrudgingly admitting that "bad guy" Bill Gates is solving the ills of the world. I've said before and I'll say it again: Macs are the least-intuitive computers I've ever used (and yes, my FIRST computer was a Macintosh back in the '80s). IPhones are amazing -- except for making, um, phone calls (and that's WHAT they're for!). And iPods are nifty -- when not prematurely dying right and left. Maybe Jobs is on to something, but despite the very vocal minority of people who swear by his products, he hasn't quite executed it just yet.

I am curious to see if Apple's overenthusiastic gay fan base will turn on a corporation that clearly cares little about them.

5 comments:

Listen, I enjoy your blog, and I am an Apple fanboy or whatever you want to call it. But those homophobic nutjobs you talk about? They also donated $100,000 to No on 8. They might be 'The Man', but they aren't homophobic. If you do a little research, a lot of Apps have been rejected due to what they randomly determine to be 'graphic content', which I don't agree with, but I also don't think it's because they are homophobic.

So what? Microsoft donated 100,000 to the referendum on Washington state: http://unitedfamiliesinternational.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/microsoft-donates-100000-to-support-same-sex-marriage/

GLEAM has existed for years: http://www.microsoft.com/about/diversity/programs/ergen/gleam.mspx

And Bill Gates has given a very candid interview to Ina Fried, a transgendered technology reporter from Cnet.com

I bet none of the above has ever stopped you from criticizing Microsoft, and it shouldn't. Their [Apple, Microsoft, etc] social responsibility has nothing to do with the rest of their practices. As much as I want to like Steve Jobs, I have found myself conflicted by his decisions: Apple's closed ecosystem, their refusal to support Flash or even any of their tools that target the iPhone OS. And now their censoring. There is a fine line between providing a good user experience and controlling user behavior, the later is outright intrusion.